Blog #7: My Struggles with Weaving

My Struggles with Weaving

Today, I was tied to a pole, by a labyrinth of ropes, for about an hour, until I was released. It was craft day at Bacari. I learned that weaving is difficult – somewhere between organic chemistry and calculus. It is labor-intensive. I now see more clearly why in Stephen’s article on “Zapotec Women” and their weaving, claims that, in the villages studied, weaving is a more profitable profession than agriculture – whereas agriculture is widely accessible, weaving is most-skilled-labor. To me, it is now a wonder that textiles are not prohibitively labor-expensive; if clothing production relied on me, humanity would still be wearing dead animals. After an hour of work – with much help – I created about a square inch of textile. …And the mini-loom was already set up for me, and I was usually weaving with four threads through the needle at once – a shortcut that surely compromises the strength& quality of the fabric – and I had a lot of help from two supervisors. At my rate, a shoddy rag would cost one unskilled (very-unskilled) man-hour per square inch; a dish-rag would cost: [minimum wage per hour]x[area of the rag in square inches]. In actuality, I don't think even the most intricate and well-made of textiles cost that much per area, as far as I have seen in Mexico – even though many of the goods sold are manufactured by methods not very different from what I was today attempting. So, as far as working with their hands, the Oaxacans must be vastly better than me; producing a unit of fabric must be far-less concentration-intensive for them. There are only so many hours in a day, so it must be that the 5-year-old kids weaving behind the kiosks work vastly more efficiently than I do, when it comes to making fabric [or speaking Spanish, or bargaining, or marketing, or taking care of siblings].  

Even after a conquest most-thorough, the non-Western Indigenous still run some circles around the White-men. Were there to be some catastrophe, and infrastructure wiped from the earth, I would find myself stunningly-lost, a cave-man who does not understand the production of textiles, and can only fathom draping himself in the tanned skins of dead animals. The textile-weaving villagers, however, might not consider it to be the end of civilization, if the internet and the global financial system one-day seized up. 500 years ago, the New World Indigenous were an immunologically-uncultured people, who were basically doomed to lose via inadvertent germ warfare, to any Old-World power they encountered. Now, however, it is the White-men – the wealthy, modern first-worlders, who lead a precarious lifestyle. Were our giant web of infrastructure to one-day collapse, we would be a billion fishes out of water, on our own earth. The dirty, unsupervised 5-year olds will look at me, "what do you mean, you can't weave? – what planet are you from?" In that scenario, Maseo will once again be my supervisor.

-Justin-